Scene

Henry the Fourth at the Barbican

Anthony Sher as Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV Part 2. Photograph by Kwame Lestrade.

After a successful run at the Royal Shakespeare Theater, Gregory Doran’s productions
of Henry the Fourth, Parts 1 and 2 re-opened at the Barbican in November. The plays were beautifully
executed, designed, and costumed, with a clarity of presentation that is characteristic
of Doran’s directing. Part 1 opened in a church, with Henry (Jasper Britton) prostrate
under a huge crucifix suspended from the ceiling. A song about Jerusalem (a repeated
motif throughout the production) was chanted, and a Christ-like Richard the Second
appeared on a platform above in order to emphasize the guilt that overshadowed Henry’s
reign. Despite the king’s genuine desire to go to the Holy Land, a shift of mood quickly
arose when Henry heard of the rebellion, then immediately threw his cape back to reveal
chain mail and a sword at the ready, making it clear that this king is always expecting
war. This gesture was repeated with the final lines of Part 2 when Prince John (Elliot
Barnes-Worrell) showed the same readiness to go to war again, throwing back his cape
and grasping for his sword. Between these two bookends, the productions of Henry IV presented a world in which the state is a powerful, cruel entity that consumes everyone
for its own ends. That is a vision of history that does not shy away from the brutal
nature of Medieval politics.

Such a focus had the intriguing side-effect of de-emphasizing Hal’s autonomy. Alex
Hassell portrayed the Prince with intelligence and charm. This fun-loving Hal emerged
onto the stage half-naked from under the bed covers with not one, but two women. The
Eastcheap scenes fully utilized the stage’s two elevated platforms, multiple tables,
and a trapdoor from which the tapster emerged, crowding the stage with merriment and
showcasing Falstaff. Yet in the midst of this revelry, Hal appeared often distraught,
or even angry. He drank heavily until his mind was clouded, no doubt in an attempt
to suppress the inevitable fate of what he must become. At one point the end of his
scene overlapped with the beginning of Hotspur’s, and the prince saw his rival through
a sort of drunken haze, haunted thoroughly by this vision which appeared against his
will. When Hal and Falstaff rehearsed the imminent meeting with the king, Hal was
light and happy until the drastic change between “
I do” and “
I will.” In this interpretation, Hal was not voicing a choice, but instead an inevitability,
and his horror at this moment of realization was palpable.

During the actual meeting with Henry, Hal attempted a genuine display of earnest boyish
promises, but the king merely laughed at him. As a father, he was rough and angry,
even physically abusive. He was not comforted by his eldest son’s assurances, but
only dismissed such language and demanded proof. Similarly, Henry was not proud, but
instead annoyed by Hal when he offered the chivalric challenge to Hotspur before the
battle of Shrewsbury. The moment when Hal saved Henry on the battlefield was the only
time the king was impressed, for these were tangible actions befitting the warlike
nature of his reign. The production perfectly illustrated the notion of the body politic:
Hal had not saved his father, but the kingdom in the person of his father.

By the end of Part 1, much of the life and individuality had been taken out of Hal;
throughout Part 2, therefore, he pursued a course of action that had a tendency to
make him much more like his cold and efficient brother, John. His one attempt to play
a trick on Falstaff fell painfully flat. Hal and Poins seemed like foolish fraternity
boys who sought to re-live their glory days and found that all of the pranks no longer
had any meaning. Henry showed occasional signs of having had a youthful personality
and vitality, perhaps when he was known as Bolingbroke, but this has completely passed.
Henry thus emerged as a fascinating study of a king who had long since lost his humanity
because he had become the embodiment of the kingdom. Even when Henry was weeping and
being weighed down by cares, he still did not seem as much a real person as a symbol
of a diseased state. And as this abstraction, Henry overpowered his heir.

The Percy family echoed the same generational tension. Rather than being a strong
independent force, Hotspur (Trevor White) seemed like a pawn of his father and uncle.
They barked orders at him and even at one point abused him by tweaking his ear. Hotspur
was thus jumpy, erratic, and insecure (tendencies that carried over into his exchanges
with Lady Percy). While this behavior did illustrate the notion that the older generations
had become cruel political instruments, the characterization caused a loss of depth
to Hotspur, who did not seem a likely war hero or adequate foil to Hal. Hal seemed
saddened by Hotspur’s death, but given his characterization in Part 1, it was not
clear why; Harry Percy was not a competing star so much as a damaged child. The position
of Hal’s foil thus largely fell to Prince John, whose continued menacing presence
in Part 2 served as an uncomfortable reminder of what Hal would inevitably become.

The emphasis upon the state and politics at the expense of individuality naturally
made for a grim focus. The great genius of this production, however, was the way in
which this framework allowed for the magnificent vitality of Falstaff. Antony Sher’s
portrayal of the fat knight showed him as a unique individual in the midst of the
political facelessness, reveling in life, carnivalesque disorder, and human community.
Although he was large and had difficulty walking, the humor of this portrayal did
not rest upon the physicality of the character, but instead upon the language. It
became clear that Hal and others enjoyed Falstaff precisely because he was so smart
and witty—a man who made every party much more enjoyable because of the unexpected
phrases that tumbled off his tongue. His metaphors and his “if” clauses rang clearly,
painting visual pictures that gave life and spirit to an otherwise gray world.

Therefore, when Falstaff became a naysayer to honor, it was easy to find him attractive,
because it so compellingly voiced a resistance to the ideology that is used as a mechanism
of power. Such a positive portrayal did, of course, have the unfortunate side-effect
of whitewashing Falstaff’s own ethically problematic behavior (e.g. robbing pilgrims,
misusing the king’s press, setting up poor soldiers as cannon fodder). Nonetheless,
he and his world offered a much-needed voice against the political machine. Especially
in Part 2, Falstaff’s life force was supported by those around him. The scenes with
Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, as well as those with Justices Silence and Shallow,
echoed the example of joyous individuality set by Falstaff. Again, the scenes were
most successful when the language became the source of humor, rather than over-wrought
physical business (as, unfortunately, characterized the scene with Pistol).

The most successful moment of showing the contrast between the state and its people
occurred in Part 2’s Act 3, scene 1, when Mistress Quickly slept in her chair while
Henry came out to deliver his speech about the cares of the kingdom. The sick king
draped a cloak around his shoulders—a cloak decorated with a map of Britain (first
displayed by Glendower in Part 1). In this scene it was clear that Henry, as both
an individual and an embodiment of the state, had been destroyed by Richard’s prophecy.
The frailty of the sleeping woman in the background served as a poignant reminder
of how difficult it was for anyone to avoid being destroyed along with these greater
forces.

In this world abstractions such as Rumor and Opinion carried special strength as well,
since they mattered more than people. For this reason, Rumor’s prologue at the beginning
of Part 2 held special relevance to this production. The speech was disjunctively
presented by Antony Byrne in modern dress, wearing a Rolling Stones tongue t-shirt
and answering a call on his cell phone. In Twitter fashion, #rumor and other words
appeared on the back screen, providing contemporary “relevance” to this speech. However,
the sudden modern turn was not necessary. The rest of the production did such a good
job of showing how abstractions matter without requiring that we be hit over the head
with its appropriateness to our world as well as the late medieval one.

In keeping with the somber music that opened Part 1 and the “
uneasy lies the head” speech by Henry in Part 2, the first appearance that Hal made as Henry the Fifth
focused upon the grave concerns of managing a state. Everything from the young king’s
dress to his walk and speech showed that he had fully adopted the weight and consequent
facelessness of the state. The repudiation of Falstaff was thus utterly cold and rehearsed,
without any hint of pain or regret. Falstaff, expecting the accustomed improvisation
which he and Hal once shared, was utterly shell-shocked. At this moment, Falstaff’s
ubiquitous power to use language to find his way out of any situation deserted him,
and there was thus no doubt that this rejection would break him.

The one other character who could have provided hope for the continuation of Falstaff’s
legacy was the Page Boy, played by a very young actor (Luca Saraceni-Gunner). Throughout
Part 2, he provided Falstaff with constant companionship and showed a promising wit,
independence, and devilish passion. After Prince John’s prediction of imminent war
with France, the boy became the ominous focus of the play’s final tableau. He took
center stage in the spotlight, before he was enclosed in darkness—a clear reminder
of the fate of the boys in Henry V.

That autumn in Stratford I saw two other Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) productions
that ended on a similar note. The White Devil concluded with the young prince kicking the dead bodies in front of him and laughing,
carrying on the sociopathic personalities of his parents. More similarly to Henry IV, The Shoemaker’s Holiday concluded with an armband being tied on the apprentice so that he could take part
in the next war. The fact that several RSC productions in 2014 gave this ominous look
at the future by focusing on the unfortunate fate of a boy seems an interesting coincidence—perhaps
one inspired by the British emphasis in 2014 upon the centennial of World War One’s
outbreak and the “lost generation.” To quote from one of the speeches that this production
of Henry IV made especially memorable:

If these boys serve as another way to show a prophecy of the future, it is a grim
one indeed. Such a focus is not unwarranted when staging Shakespeare’s history plays,
but it is admittedly sobering. This is why, for the first time in my experience of
watching this play onstage, I was thoroughly sad to see Falstaff go.